(CJES/IFEX) – Ulan-Ude Mayor Gennady Aidayev has asked the prosecutor’s office of the Republic of Buryatia to initiate a criminal case against Inna Savchenkova, editor of the newspaper “Nomer Odin”, whom he accuses of slander. The city of Ulan-Ude is the capital of the Buryat Republic, located in southeast Russia. Savchenkova has told CJES that […]
(CJES/IFEX) – Ulan-Ude Mayor Gennady Aidayev has asked the prosecutor’s office of the Republic of Buryatia to initiate a criminal case against Inna Savchenkova, editor of the newspaper “Nomer Odin”, whom he accuses of slander. The city of Ulan-Ude is the capital of the Buryat Republic, located in southeast Russia.
Savchenkova has told CJES that Aidayev’s claims are regarding a short report about a meeting with the mayor. In that meeting, which addressed the issue of the demolition of illegally constructed buildings, Aidayev had said, “Let these people live in dumpsters.” Savchenkova says, “I was summoned to the district prosecutor’s office and asked to write an explanation regarding that information. However, Aidarov’s statement was not shown to me. In the prosecutor’s office I was told that we had slandered the mayor and that he had not said anything like that. There, I was also told that the mayor had problems with another article run by our paper. It was an interview with Leonid Tkachenko, former director of the business Vodokanal. In the interview, Tkachenko said that the budget funds allocated for the city’s housing and utilities sector are controlled by only one person, Gennady Aidayev. That statement was also seen by the mayor as slander.”
Savchenkova explained to CJES that, several years ago, various people had built houses on the outskirts of Ulan-Ude. Those people have now lost their houses. “The thing is that the land prices have gone up and the mayor’s office has realized that it can make good money by selling it [the land on which the homes were built], and for that reason the houses were demolished, but the people were not offered anything; they are being thrown out in the streets. When the media write that people can’t be thrown out in the streets and the mayor’s office has to find some solution, Gennady Aidayev does not like such publications. And he tries to silence us using the prosecutor’s office,” said the journalist.
“Nomer Odin” director Viktoriya Loginova said that nothing like this has occurred since the establishment of the paper. “It is a purely civil case; we don’t understand what it has to do with slander, the prosecutor’s office and a criminal case,” she said. She assumes that the mayor believes he is not likely to win a civil case against the paper and is therefore trying to initiate a criminal case against it.
